Foreign Minister Pham Bình Minh says Southeast Asian countries are trying to
strike a balance between competing US and Chinese interests in disputed waters
Hanoi and Beijing both claim areas of South China Sea but Vietnam insists it
wants to avoid conflict

Some oil blocks off Vietnam’s sprawling coastline fall within an area of the
South China Sea demarcated by China’s “nine-dash line,” the basis for Beijing’s
controversial claims to most of the resource-rich waterway.

The drilling ship at the center of a row between Vietnam and China over oil
prospecting in disputed waters in the South China Sea has arrived in waters off
the Malaysian port of Labuan, shipping data in Thomson Reuters Eikon showed on
Monday.

State-run newspapers in Vietnam and China reported in recent days that
senior military officials from the two countries would hold a fence-mending
gathering along a border where their militaries fought a brief but bloody war
in 1979.

Hackers linked with Vietnam's government are likely targeting Philippine
state agencies to gather intelligence related to the maritime dispute in the
South China Sea, cybersecurity company FireEye (FEYE.O) said on Thursday.

China and Vietnam pledged on Saturday to manage their differences and
safeguard peace in the South China Sea, in a joint communique issued during a
visit to China by Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong.

Vietnam is extending a runway on an island it claims in the South China Sea
in apparent response to China's building of military facilities on artificial
islands in the region, according to a US think tank.